Tag: project management

Trello is a fast, easy way to organize anything, from your day-to-day work, to a favorite side project. Trello is everywhere – on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows 8 Tablet, and your web browser, making collaboration easier.

Usersnap integrates well with Trello, assisting you in collecting and discussing feedback between developers, customers and quality assurance engineers.

Working on a web project?

Getting annotated screenshots attached to bug reports will raise a smile on every developer’s face. Usersnap allows your testers to provide a visual description of what might be a bug in form of annotated screenshots. Additionally you will get important information such as the used browser, the used operating system and the URL where the bug has occurred. Your testers can choose between a drawing pen, a highlighting tool and sticky notes to illustrate and annotate the bug report. To enable Usersnap on your web project, a snippet of code has to be added, which is as simple as installing Google Analytics (TM). After that, a feedback-button appears and one can collect bug reports directly in Trello. Continue Reading “Improve Trello cards with user feedback” →

Or: when your colleague’s inbox zero bliss results in inbox hell for you

In the startup world, when you mention that you’re working towards / or you have reached ‘inbox zero’, you’ll get some admiring nods from whoever is listening to you. Not from me though. I’ll let you in on a secret: inbox zero is a lie. Why? Because answering all your mails – preferably before 8 am so no-one will be up to write a reply – means you’ll create ‘inbox overflow’ for your co-workers. Just pushing unreads back and forth is not going to ‘fix’ email (yes, it’s broken).

Chief Email Officer

Our CEO often jokes that the ‘E’ in his job title stands for ‘Email’. Working on the same desk, I do see a constant stream of messages coming in on his screen. There’s very little you can do about the email behavior of your clients, business contacts or external email fanatics. The very least we – as a team – can do is creating filters and stop bothering each other with loads of non-descriptive emails and funsies (or maybe create a chat room for that sort of things – one that you can mute). Continue Reading “The dark side of inbox zero” →

Adrian Smith is a self-employed software architecture and performance consultant currently working on a platform for HR departments that implements quite a few special features. Adrian decided to use Usersnap for this project, to gather specific feedback from his client during the development process.

“We’re using Usersnap on our dev server as the site isn’t live yet. It helps my client to point out and describe what he’d like to see improved. I like this way of receiving feedback. He can highlight areas of the screen etc., i.e. he can really visually say what’s wrong. Which is of course way better than writing an email following the storyline ‘on the third navigation point, the second area, the 3rd word is in a strange position’!”

Launched in 2004, Basecamp is one of the oldest web-based project management and collaboration tools on the web. With 150,000 companies using Basecamp, it’s definitely one of the most successful PM tools out there. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp relaunched Basecamp as “New Basecamp” back in March this year. The “old” Basecamp Classic is still available and it is still possible to sign up for a Basecamp Classic account. Since the classic version is not actively promoted any longer, this blog post refers only to the “New Basecamp“.

Instead of reviewing all features of Basecamp and comparing them to other tools, let’s focus on five real life requirements for a project management tool which is used for managing web development projects. These requirements are experiences we gathered in the last couple of years.

Let’s face it: There is no such thing as a perfect software. There are always bugs and you don’t need to be tech-savvy to find them. It is even crucial to test software with people missing a technical background – they are in general less merciful about issues which are trivial in a programmer’s eye. Getting trivial bug reports is the key to improve the usability and the user experience of web applications.

In general the person with the missing technical background will hit your inbox in this way: